“I concur,” Nadia said firmly. She looked squarely at the CID. “I have studied the intelligence on this man with great care. Except in rare and completely unpredictable circumstances, like this clandestine meeting with Sergei Tarzarov, he surrounds himself with armed bodyguards, most of them FSB or Spetsnaz veterans. When he travels, he uses a wide variety of alternate routes, often employing decoy vehicles. To have any hope of success, an assassination attempt would require a sizable team equipped with heavy weapons. And any force large enough to complete the mission could never infiltrate undetected or escape successfully after the deed was done.”
“Then I will kill him myself,” the CID said tonelessly. “No weapon that Truznyev’s goons carry can stop me.”
Whoa there, big guy, Brad thought. What the hell had gotten into his father? “Dad, with all due respect, that’s nuts,” he said stubbornly. “Even if we could somehow slip a CID into Moscow on the sly, nailing Truznyev with one would be the same thing as taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times telling the whole world that we did it.”
“Who cares?” his father said flatly, still not bothering to use the voice synthesizer program that most closely matched his natural human tones. “It’s time to stop tap-dancing around Gennadiy Gryzlov and his thugs. Waiting like penned sheep while he makes his next move is an act of criminal stupidity.”
Abruptly, the CID containing Patrick McLanahan swung into motion, prowling around the conference table. Around and around, the huge fighting machine stalked, the very image of armored, eerily quiet lethality.
“Killing Truznyev, right under his nose, practically within spitting distance of the Kremlin, will send Gryzlov the only kind of message he understands,” the machine said forcefully.
“But, Dad, I—” Brad began, trying hard to think of some argument, any argument, that could break through whatever strange and murderous impulse held his father in an icy, implacable grip. He saw the anxious look in Nadia’s eyes and knew the same fears were mirrored in his own gaze.
Martindale held up a hand to stop him.
“Well, your suggestion is certainly worth considering more carefully, General,” the gray-haired head of Scion said hesitantly. “I suggest you work up a detailed plan for the operation. Once that’s done, we can bring President Wilk into the discussion and—”
Sirens went off suddenly outside the hangar, rising and falling in unearthly, earsplitting wails.
For a split second, Brad sat frozen, taken completely by surprise. Time itself seemed to slow down, with separate milliseconds ticking by one after the other. Whose bright idea was it to schedule a defense exercise now, smack-dab in the middle of a crucial strategy conference?
Then a loudspeaker blared, “Incoming! Incoming! Take cover!”
WHAAMM!
An explosion somewhere outside rocked the hangar, rattling light fixtures and knocking over water glasses on the table. Dust hung in the air, eddying oddly as concussion from the blast rippled through the room.
Oh, shit, Brad realized. This was no drill.
His father’s CID blurred into high speed, smashing right through the conference room’s locked exit. Shattered pieces of door went flying.
Reacting almost as fast, Martindale dove under the table for cover.
Brad, Macomber, and Nadia kicked away their chairs and ran for the opening. Nadia already had her pistol, a 9mm Walther P99, out and ready. They darted through the hangar and out onto the airfield.
WHAAMM! WHAAMM! WHAAMM!
They hit the dirt as another wave of huge explosions slammed down across the base — blowing craters in the runway in blinding orange bursts. Debris fountained high into the air. Plumes of oily black smoke from burning buildings and wrecked vehicles curled across the Iron Wolf base.
“Goddamn it,” Whack snarled, scrambling back to his feet. “We’re being mortared! Some bastard out there has us zeroed in.”
Patrick McLanahan sprinted southeast through the woods beyond the base. Coldly furious, he tore through obstacles in his path instead of detouring around them, leaving a trail of jagged pieces of perimeter fence and toppled, splintered trees.
L-band radar countermortar scan complete. Firing battery located, his computer reported. Imagery flashed into his consciousness. The CID’s sensors had traced the mortar rounds hammering the Iron Wolf compound back to their origin point — a large clearing near a farm road about three kilometers outside the airfield perimeter.
Warning. Adrenaline and noradrenaline levels spiking. Acetylcholine levels dangerously low. Serotonin falling. Immediate biochemical and neurotransmitter rebalance required. Initiating emergency medical protocols now.
With a low growl, Patrick overrode the CID’s health-monitoring systems, shutting down its unwanted attempts to tamper with his brain and body chemistry. Increasingly, there were moments when stray elements in the machine’s programming unnecessarily interfered with his fighting efficiency. Like now.
It was insane. Why should he slow his reaction time in combat? Unlike ordinary humans, he knew how to surf the rolling wave of his fury, using the emotion as a means of speeding up reflexes that were already lightning fast. It was another way to gain an edge over those too weak-willed and weak-minded to push these incredible war machines to their design limits.
Glowing trails slashed across on his vision display, highlighting new mortar rounds headed for the Iron Wolf base. For a split second, Patrick was tempted to drop into air-defense mode. His autocannon could sweep those rounds out of the sky before they did more damage.
Screw that, he thought savagely. Defense was a sucker’s game. When someone hit you, you killed them. It was that simple. And that effective.
Brighter patches of sunlight shone at the edge of his vision. He was closing fast on the enemy firing position.
Red lines suddenly zigzagged across the display. His sensors had spotted lengths of carefully camouflaged trip wire laced between trees along the edge of the woods. And each trip wire was tied into a powerful demolition charge.
That was clever, he decided. Those booby traps could have inflicted serious casualties on any conventional reaction force. His mouth twisted into a cruel smile. It was just too damned bad for the enemy that they were up against a killing machine, not a platoon of vulnerable human infantry.
Still sprinting at top speed, Patrick leaped high, clearing the tangle of trip wires in one long bound. He thudded down heavily in a field beyond the tree line.
Five hundred meters downrange, he spotted several men wearing civilian clothing gathered around a large tube with a baseplate and bipod assembly. Weapon identified, the CID’s computer announced, transferring the data through his neural links faster than conscious thought.
He scowled. That was a Polish-made 98mm heavy mortar. Probably one of a pair that had gone missing last year, sold on the black market by a crooked Polish supply sergeant. Nice, he thought coldly. Nothing said the universe really was not a warm and cuddly place quite like getting the crap blown out of you with a weapon made by your own allies.
Crack!
A .50-caliber round slammed into the CID’s torso at 860 meters per second. Its enormous impact knocked him backward a step and shattered several of the robot’s camouflage tiles. The bullet itself tumbled away, deflected by his composite armor. His jaw tightened. Damn it, that was enough.